Paste once. Stop opening five counters.
The job is boring and the search volume is not. Students need a number for a 1,500-word cap. SEO people need characters for a title that Google will truncate. Social teams need to know they are 12 characters over a post limit. Every other counter I tried either posted the draft to a server “for analytics” or wrapped the textarea in three feature cards and a newsletter gate. This one is a box and a strip of counts. Type or paste. The strip moves.
I count tokens on whitespace because that is what humans mean by “word” in an assignment. It is a terrible model of linguistics and a decent model of homework. Hyphenated “state-of-the-art” is one token here. If your style guide disagrees, your style guide wins. Character counts include spaces unless you look at the “no spaces” cell.
Worked example: a 1,500-word essay
Paste the draft. If words read 1,482 you are inside a typical university band. If characters-with-spaces explode because you padded with double spaces after periods, that is a you problem. Reading time at 238 wpm is a briefing for how long a TA will actually look at it. It is not a defense against “too short.”
Worked example: title tag
Type a title. Watch the “Meta title” remainder. Around 50–60 characters is the folklore for desktop SERPs; Google does not publish a hard cap that you should tattoo. If remainder is −40, cut. If you stuffed the brand name twice, cut harder.
Worked example: a post that must fit in 280
Paste the tweet. Remainder goes negative in real time so you stop editing in the composer, copying out, editing, copying back. Links and @handles still count as characters. I do not special-case t.co wrapping because that wrapping is not your draft’s problem until you publish.
Limits this will lie about
CJK text without spaces undercounts “words.” Screen-reader time is not speaking time. Markdown syntax is characters even when it will not render. If you paste a PDF via a bad OCR, you will count garbage. Sentence splits on “Dr. Smith went.” will fire too early. I would rather show the seam than ship a neural sentence segmenter that fetches a model from a CDN.
For privacy: a word counter that uploads a thesis to score “readability” is a product. This is not that product. If you need Flesch-Kincaid, run it locally in a tool you trust, or accept that grade-level scores were a 1970s heuristic.
Before you celebrate the count
Paste the final, not the outline. Decide whether the cap is words or characters before you celebrate. Check the platform remainder if the destination is a form with a hard maxlength. Keep secrets out of the box. Close the tab when you are done so the next person on a shared machine does not inherit your cover letter.
How do you count a word?
Whitespace splits. “Don’t” is one word. Newlines are whitespace. A string of emojis without spaces is one token.
Characters with or without spaces?
Both. Many CMS fields care about characters including spaces; some academic limits do not.
Is reading time accurate?
It uses ~238 words per minute for silent reading and ~130 for speaking. Dense jargon reads slower. Poetry is chaos.
Why show Twitter and meta limits?
Because that is what people actually paste into counters. Remaining characters update live. Negative means you are over.
Does this upload my draft?
No. The textarea never leaves this tab. I still would not paste secrets. Tabs get screenshots.
Sentences?
Splits on . ! ? which fails on abbreviations (“Dr.”) and ellipses. Treat sentence count as approximate.
Google Docs vs this?
Docs counts can differ on hyphenation and fields. If a professor specified Microsoft Word, use Word.